New Plays on Broadway

The Deadly Game (adapted from a novel of Friedrich Duerrenmatt by James Yaffe) catches the author of the bitterly sardonic The Visit in a slightly more playful mood. His playfulness involves the gallows; his answer to man's love of money is to put a price on his head. This time his people play murder. A brash, coarse, well-heeled American salesman (Pat Hingle), whose car has broken down, asks a snowy night's lodging in a Swiss chalet. There he finds a retired judge (Ludwig Donath), a retired prosecutor (Max Adrian) and a retired defense lawyer (Claude Dauphin) who meet regularly to dine well and then stage trials--in a "Court of the Unconscious, where the law does not reach"--of various living or historical characters. Invited to stand trial for murder, the American, equally cocksure of his innocence and his smartness at games, accepts. Under steady grilling, he makes more and more admissions while growing more and more angry, until it becomes clear that he had coveted his boss's job and half-unconsciously brought about his boss's death.

As another of Duerrenmatt's pessimistic, Pernod-flavored judgments on mankind, The Deadly Game has both its moral and its theatrical merits. Few men tried at Duerrenmatt's Court of the Unconscious would escape whipping; in the unconscious of the very men who stage the trials there may lurk as much blood lust as love of law. They, with their icy, refined, half-mad sense of justice, and the American, with his coldhearted dog-eat-dog view of life, face one another with contrasted inhumanity; the space between them seems nothing less at times than all groping humanity itself. But the play has a parlor-game brittleness and bite, and at its best a thrusting theatricality. Adapter Yaffe needs half an evening of won't-you-walk-into-my-parlor? before he is ready with his parlor game; and is perhaps overready to have his American convict himself, to create another death of a salesman. Even with good acting, the play does not really have enough impact: Duerrenmatt's story does not quite emerge as a well-rounded play; the clever game never quite reaches the level of a serious judgment.

Roman Candle (by Sidney Sheldon), which closed at week's end, was a farce about an Army scientist pursued by a girl with extrasensory perception. The pursuit took place in back-to-back Washington apartments, with time out for launching missiles in Alaska and for unloosing endless gags about the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, horse racing, Eisenhower golf, lovemaking, martini-making and money.

Roman Candle is one of those mechanized gag-farces that, along with a few good gags, are full of forced plot twists and vaudeville turns, broken-down scene writing and fruitless inventions.

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